As is known, mosaicking is “a design made by inlaying a combination of small pieces of various colors of stone, glass, marble, and the like into a floor, wall, or the like, or a technique of obtaining such design” (Gendai Kokugo Jiten, Sanseido).
Using this technique, a design or photo image can be formed by combining a large number of photo images.
However, in an image generation method based on conventional mosaicking, source images are limited to still images, and moving images cannot be used as sources, and a moving mosaic image (which changes along with the elapse of time) cannot be generated.
Also, in the image generation method based on conventional mosaicking, a very large number of source images must be prepared, and source images corresponding to image characteristics of individual areas must be selected from those images upon generating a mosaic image.
Therefore, even when a large number of source images are prepared, only some partial source images are used, and most of images are not used, i.e., most of source images prepared with efforts stay unseen.